Is It Too Late for America?
Around the year 720, a man dressed in soldier’s garb knelt within a secret cave deep in the mountains to pray before a forbidden image of the Virgin Mary. The image, which had been hidden in the cave by a local hermit to save it from destruction by Muslim Moorish conquerors, was regarded as the patroness of the region, a remote valley in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain called Covadonga. The man kneeling in prayer was named Pelagius, and he was a Spanish Visigoth and Christian dismayed by what was happening in his homeland. Less than a decade earlier, the Moorish armies of the Ummayad Caliphate had invaded the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa, swiftly conquering most of Christian Spain and Portugal before crossing the Pyrenees into France. It appeared to terrified Christians in Western Europe that, as they had already done in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and North Africa, the armies of Islam were racing toward a decisive conquest of the heartland of Christianity and the fledgling civilization of the West.
But Pelagius was unwilling to surrender. Deep in the last Christian holdout on the Iberian Peninsula, the remote and forested mountains of Asturias, he prayed for divine assistance and prepared to resist the invader to his final breath. He was the elected leader of the last free state in Spain, and he intended to do his duty.
He had already made his position known by leading a tax revolt against the Moorish authorities, and then expelling the local governor they had installed. Finally, the Moors decided to quash this troublesome rebel and his followers once and for all, and sent a large force, led by two commanders named Alqama and Munuza, to do the job. To the surprise of Pelagius and the Asturians, the Moors were accompanied by a bishop, Oppas of Seville, who had allied himself with the enemy and tried to convince the rebels to surrender.
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